Finishing the Analytic and limiting the categories
November 30, 2009
My dog, Jacky, is close when I spill some food on my trousers and after I clean up he checks it out and finds the trousers smelling good and tasting good. So he licks a bit until I stop him.
A few weeks later perhaps Jacky notices my pants and an image of good aromas and licks pops up and he checks me out.
If this is what he is doing then he has no conception of cause and effect, for he would have realized that it was the spill of the food and not the trousers that caused the smell and taste. Although I must admit that he might consider trousers differently and imagine hundreds of these trousers in the closet and at least one of them smells and tastes good. And this would be the same to him as coming into and going out of existence, i.e., sometimes (at least once) the good smelling and tasting trousers suddenly appeared before Jacky (for what evidence is there that trousers continue to exist when the door is closed?). If they did it once they could do it again, and perhaps this is the time, the time of the good smelling and licking trousers.
Considering this then further we see that I am imagining a continuation through time of the same trousers and so hence where it is meaningful to speak of cause and effect, namely the smell and taste are a result of the food that fell onto the trouser. Jacky, on the other hand, might be seeing trousers and coming and going, and where “out of sight†is equivalent to “do not even existâ€. In that case he would be checking to see if these trousers now are good smelling and tasting trousers or not. After all the looks of the good tasting and smelling trousers are close to (actually identical with) the trousers which have no such good taste and smell, and so it is easy to confuse them, and so you have to check them out to find out.
Thus for me the trousers are an object of experience, while Jacky is taking it for a thing on its own, and so about which no one can ever say anything for sure.
As I understand Hume if Jacky can distinguish between the trousers that smell and taste good from the trousers that don’t smell and taste good only by checking the taste and smell, then that makes the perceptions be of two different things, and not one at all. Considering which it suggests the need of Kant’s transcendental object = x in order to unify and order the specters into the objects of experience. And so once again we see that this object must be provided by the understanding in order to unify diverse perceptions and thus things (specters/appearances/Erscheinungen) into diverse perceptions of one and the same thing.
Our understanding is hardwired to certain logical relationships, e.g., something from the existence of which the existence of something else can be concluded. As a result we make judgments out of the categories with regard to things in space and time which lead us to judge that Hume’s table does not get smaller as the distance between them increases. But they have no application apart from the specters, for that alone is what can appear to us in space and time (even the pantomimic circle in mid air has to be drawn to be objective). The categories reach out to all things in general and so have meaning, but then for us absolutely no use and application except with regard to objects of experience. The categories limit the senses and indicate that there is more than meets the eye, but at the same time are limited by the senses and the human way of viewing things (via senses) in time and space as the only way that any object can appear to be thought. So we can make a problematic concept of this world which the understanding can conceive of beyond the reach of the senses, but that’s all, a problematic concept.
Recap of the Aesthetic and Analytic. We see how we can come up with objects a priori in math and the sciences, for there is something given in the specter which represents the object. This is an accomplishment of the human understanding in making judgments about the specters (and a general proof is in the common recognition of the constancy of the size of Hume’s table). And while the categories have meaning beyond experience, they have no way of being applied and so are the same as useless. It is conceivable that there is more to existence than the object of experience, but the concept is only problematic and so not here of much use at all. It limits the contention that all existence can be sensed, and that what cannot be sensed cannot exist.
Filed under: Kant